Developing material for esp courses

Developing material for ESP courses
Materials development is a typical feature of ESP courses mainly because of the attempt to offer teaching materials which fit specific subject area and specific needs of a certain group of students. Coursebooks tailored to the needs of a specific group of students are not likely to be available since publishers are understandably reluctant to produce materials for limited markets. There are cases when suitable materials are available on the market but they are not easy or affordable to buy. Another reason for writing ESP materials is simply enhancing the reputation of an institution or a teacher as a visible product of activity. The majority of commercially published teaching materials available on today's market are written by competent and experienced professional writers based on market needs analysis conducted by publishers. Although, these coursebooks are systemic through, well designed and easy to use, yet many of them lack the energy and imagination required to be considered appealing an relevant.
Basturkman and Bocanega-Valle (2018) remained that many ESP teachers are frequently directly involved in designing teaching materials as published coursebooks and other materials tend not to be relevant to the specific needs of their specialized groups of learners. However studies of how ESP teachers developed such materials have been scare.
Materials developed locally by a particular teacher or group of teachers for a particular course or group of students and with resources available at a particular time are referred to as in house materials, tailor-made materials, locally produced materials, self-designed materials, home made materials. These materials may be developed either from scratch or by adapting existing learning and authentic materials.
Developing materials for the ESP classroom is balancing among learning needs, language content and subject matter content which implies considering a number of issues.
- the target topic or carrier content
- the relevance of the topic to the specific group of students
- the ESP teacher's knowledge about the carrier content
- the students expected knowledge about the carrier content
- the learning goals
- the target language form
- required and available teaching equipment
- available, suitable and accessible materials
In conclusion, I can say who after all decide to write their own materials, there is no need for the wheel to be reinvented or in other words existing materials should be used as a course of ideas.